EL: Well, decades ago, there was ample evidence that our memories
of past events can change in helpful ways, leading us to be happier than
we might otherwise be. But memory also changes in harmful ways and can
occasionally land us--or others--in serious trouble. On the therapeutic
side, I imagine a person could have some particularly difficult memory
altered. If a patient was plagued by feelings of deep sadness or
worthlessness, I suppose the memory doctor might modify the memories
leading to the feelings. For example, if the patient was having marital
problems, the memory doctor might enhance pleasant memories involving the
spouse. On a grander scale, such doctors might even be useful for curing
societal ills such as social prejudice. Prejudice can be, for example,
based in part on a few incidents involving a unique group of people, so
the memory doctor could wipe out or alter memory of these incidents.
Memory doctors would be nearly omnipotent. They would hold the key to
total mind control.
WC: It would be a customized form of book burning. While a lot of
people would have serious reservations about this, I can see some
consumers loving it.
EL: Scores of studies on memory distortion had been conducted.
People recalled a clean-shaven man as having a mustache, and even
straight hair as curly. This showed that misleading post-event
information can alter a person's recollection in powerful, predictable
ways. In the real world, such misinformation is often available via
hearsay or when people, who experience the same event, talk to one
another and fill in gaps by guessing.
After years of investigation about the power of misinformation,
researchers knew a fair amount about the conditions that made people
susceptible to its damage. People were particularly prone to having their
memories modified when the passage of time first allows the memory to
fade. In its faded, weakened condition, memory becomes defenseless to
misinformation.
WC: So all of that was known, long before the boom in "recovered
memories" hit the courtrooms?
EL: Definitely. And we researchers would never have guessed that
such a prospector version of the memory specialist was in the making. But
they were. "Repressed memory therapists" went out and prospected for
early childhood memories of trauma. "Are you sure you weren't
abused?"
In the process they appear to have inadvertently created false
memories of the worst sort in some of their clients. This is not to say
that there haven't been many thousands of genuine cases of child abuse.
Psychotherapy has surely been a comfort to many victims. But the
aggressive use of memory work led some patients to false memories of
child molestation, ones that were a blend of dreams and movies, made real
only by suggestion. In some cases, what surfaced were violent traumas
spanning years of the patient's life. If these were false memories, the
patient was surely being harmed.
WC: Even with the best intentions and the best of precautions, the
cure is sometimes worse than the disease. When the therapist is
ill-informed, it happens even more often.
EL: So where do we think the field of memory is going now?
WC: Better research ideas can happen anytime, but what's more
predictable is the applied technology and its legal ramifications, lust
remember what fingerprint and other physical evidence standards did to
the former reliance on sweating a confession out of a suspect, with all
its hazards of suggesting a nonexistent memory. Once webcams become
ubiquitous, they too will reduce the number of times that the unsupported
word has to decide things.
EL: Webcams in preschools are truly amazing. We're raising a whole
generation used to being "on camera." There's a new video monitoring
system in which parents can go into a web browser, enter a password, and
have access to a live video feed of their child in daycare at any time,
no matter where in the world they tap into the Internet. Check once, or
watch all day from a little window in one corner of your computer screen
at work. The idea does have its drawbacks: Overprotective parents can
check compulsively. Other parents can watch your child misbehaving. Maybe
they'll sue you, too, if the video file shows your Johnny hitting their
Susie.
WC: The novelist David Brin explores the possible effects of tiny
cameras mounted in your eyeglass frames in one of his novels. "Peepers,"
he called them, and depicted disgusted adults using them to record
misbehaving youths riding on public transit.
EL: A publicly supported surveillance trend began in Britain nearly
20 years ago. They installed 60 remote-controlled video cameras at
various "trouble spots." Where they put them, crime dropped by
half.
WC: Just think what ubiquitous webcams and eyeglass cams will do to
make the public aware of what the eyewitness memory researchers have been
saying all along: Eyewitnesses are often badly mistaken, after some time
has passed. The public is used to the instant replays to prove the
referee wrong on occasion. Soon we'll have a courtroom industry devoted
to mining video files, just to supplement eyewitness testimony. Just as
DNA has changed the standards of evidence for rape convictions, the
webcams and email archives will change the standards for all sorts of
things.
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